3/03/2009 @ 6:00PM

Why Celebrities Twitter

While training in Hawaii last January, Lance Armstrong received a massage every afternoon at 3 p.m. Shaquille O’Neal often can’t sleep after embarrassing losses–he suffers from what he calls “Shaqsomnia.” On Nov. 10, Britney Spear’s son Jayden was hospitalized for food poisoning.

These celebrity tidbits shared in 140-character blurbs on Twitter were once the paydirt of paparazzi who make their careers selling evidence of the bizarre and banal lives of the rich and famous. Now, the explosive growth of the microblogging platform means those starmongers have a new source of competition: the stars themselves.

A quick glance at the most “followed” microbloggers on Twitter shows that 20 or so of the top 100 feeds on the site are written by real-world celebrities. And those high-profile users often twitter, or “tweet,” the same sort of idiosyncratic life details as anyone else.

Hammer (the artist formerly known as MC Hammer) revealed in January that he carries three cell phones–a 3G iPhone, a T-Mobile G1 and a
Motorola
Q9. Ashton Kutcher declared earlier this month that, after seven attempts, he’s starting to like yoga. And the singer Dave Matthews recently noted that his farts sound “like a heard of elephants.”

Some “tweets” are even more personal. Last month singer Erykah Badu and her boyfriend Twittered the birth of her daughter, complete with blow-by-blow details. “Water broke,” the baby’s father, producer Jay Electronica, twittered on his own feed via BlackBerry. “I can see the head, it’s covered in hair.”

That kind of sharing may seem like self-inflicted privacy invasion, but it isn’t a mistake, says Laura Fitton, a social media consultant and one of Twitter’s most-followed users. In some cases, it’s savvy media control.

“It’s more about controlling your privacy than giving it up,” Fitton says. “When Britney shares her details on Twitter, it’s not going to stop paparazzi from stalking her. But it devalues the stuff they’re able to steal from her. She’s actually reaching in and taking back a piece of the paparazzi economy.”

In Shaquille O’Neal’s case, creating a Twitter presence was originally a tactic for shutting down an impostor. Last September, O’Neal’s media consultant, Kathleen Hessert, says she discovered someone posing as the gargantuan Phoenix Suns player on Twitter and warned her colleagues. One suggested calling a lawyer. Instead, she recommended Shaq himself start microblogging. “I told him to just be his larger than life self and that other person will seem inconsequential,” she says.

The next morning, O’Neal twittered his first post: “this is the real SHAQUILLE O’NEAL.” A few hours later, he followed up with some advice. “Good morning everyone. Let me give you all a hint on how to relate to me, Shaquille O’Neal I have a sense of humor [and] I am very quotatious.”

Since then, he’s offered daily wisdom, (“The best way to secure happiness is 2 b az happy as u can everyday”) requests for advice (“I need help subway or schlotsskys for lunch, big game tonite”) and a few personal notes. (“i been down lately, my greatgranmother died 2 days ago, she was 92.”) More than 213,000 users follow his Twitter feed.

“People want to know about celebrities as people,” says Hessert. “Those celebrities willing to share and do it authentically, those are the people who are going to engage fans in a way that builds their brand and perpetuates sponsors, and creates a kind of affinity that’s hard to beat.”

Twitter is quickly becoming a way to reach more than just a geeky cluster of technophiles. According to Web tracker comScore, the site attracted close to 2 million unique visitors in January, up tenfold from a year before. And that number doesn’t include potentially millions more Twitterers who access the service via cellphones or from desktop applications like Twhirl or Tweetdeck.

According to social media researcher Dan Zarrella, those Twitterers also pass along celeb content virally more often than other Web users. They’re slightly more likely than non-Twitterers to share new content on Facebook, twice as likely to post it on social media sites like Digg or Reddit and about three times as likely to repost content in a blog, according to his study.

But some celebrities have used Twitter with mixed results. Stephen Colbert, for instance, sent out satiric and often bizarre one-liners from his feed for most of 2007. (“The world is a dirty place, and I am America’s lemon-scented wet-nap” or “Guess what: The E in E-Mail … stands for ‘E-Mail.’) But the aphorisms seemed to be the work of an assistant, and the feed went silent later that year. “I think the whole Twitter community is having a pent-up nerdgasm waiting for Colbert to start twittering as himself,” Fitton says.

And Twitter’s broadcasting platform isn’t without risk for celebrities. In January, hackers broke into several accounts, including those of CNN’s Rick Sanchez, Fox News and Britney Spears. From Spears’ Twitter feed, the hackers vividly described the orthodontia of the singer’s nether regions.

Tina Fey has had her own Twitter troubles. For months, the 30 Rock star seemed to be posting remarkably honest commentary ranging from the political (“‘But Daddy, Obama’s kids are getting a puppy, why can’t I?’ Because Daddy voted for McCain.”) to the extremely personal (“For some reason, my farts smell like dog food. I don’t think I ate any.”). The account gained more than 30,000 followers.

Then, in February, Fey revealed that she wasn’t writing the Tina Fey feed and didn’t know the source of the fraudulent Fey-alike. “Whoever is writing my Twitter account is pretty funny,” she wrote in a statement to NYmag.com, “But it’s not me.”

It’s enough to make any celeb wary of the budding microblog phenomenon. Or, for those willing to do some sharing of their own, to take the reins of their own Twitter feed and build a following. All it takes, as Shaquille O’Neal might say, is to “have a sense of humor” and be “quotatious.”